


Destination Unknown

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2018-08-30 21:39:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8550073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: the one where they stay





	

The clouds are pink tonight, scattered against the sky that looks a little too harshly blue like someone put in the wrong hex code. Or maybe it’s just the contrast, the late sunlight eaten up by the fresh pink on the clouds, the same color as his second-favorite dress shirt that’s a little bit stiff but Wei likes the way he looks in it (and he’ll never say it with words in a language Tatsuya understands, but he’ll say it with his eyes and the corners of his mouth in the language that’s Tatsuya’s favorite when he uses it). Regardless of the colors, it’s still too early for sunset.

Mid-September up through maybe April, it always feels too early for sunset; it’s not at all like when he moved here in the middle of June and the days were rich and long and it was a little too humid but otherwise okay, maybe the way his childhood felt but he’s making shit up now, remembering things he definitely didn’t register because he’d been a kid and they hadn’t been noteworthy to him, just the way things were.

This doesn’t feel particularly noteworthy to him, just the way things are and the way they shouldn’t be, like how it’s November and he’s wearing a scarf not just for decoration. It’s not a decoration at all, in truth; it’s a bulky orange wool thing Fukui had bought Wei for his birthday one year, sent with a note that they were all the rage in Tokyo. Wei took the bait but wouldn’t wear the damn thing because no matter how cosmopolitan they were the people in Tokyo were kind of idiots about this. But ugly and unstylish as it is, it’s still warm, and if Wei’s going to steal all of Tatsuya’s cashmere Gucci scarves Tatsuya’s going to steal this thing right back. (He’s pretty enough to look good in it anyway, something that had made Wei smack him with the fringe when he’d said it.)

Tatsuya had sent a thank-you text to Fukui, saying that there had been minimal amusement regarding Wei trying to “fit in” and that they’d be leaving soon, so it didn’t matter. Fukui had told him to be nice to his upperclassmen.

He and Wei don’t talk so much about leaving anymore.

It’s not that they don’t think about it; it’s not that it doesn’t sometimes press down on the heel of Tatsuya’s hand like a bruise that he isn’t at home, that at home he’d find better pickup basketball or be able to do more with his friends out late at night, go clubbing and dance until they’re shaking harder than the frazzled beats and try and convince the teenager working the drive-thru at that one Taco Bell to let them walk through. Except the last time he’d done that had been high school; he’d been sixteen with a shitty fake ID and disposable friends and he knows how to be sixteen in Los Angeles but he doesn’t know how to be twenty-one there. He’d always assumed he’d just grow into it, but he doesn’t know what all the good clubs are, which have older women to buy him drinks because they think he has a cute smile and where he can hustle pool, which drive-thrus are a safe bet and which detours from the freeway are still viable.

But he knows where the semi-reliable street ball games are here and which days of the week red meat goes on special at the grocery store, the bars where it’s safe to hold Wei’s hand above the table, which neighborhoods are up-and-coming and where to get a decent sweet curry.

They extend their lease a year every year, sink more of their incomes into the tiny one-bedroom as the stuff keeps piling up, postcards tacked on the wall since they’ll have to spackle them anyway, out-of-season clothes pushed into the closets after they’d finally thrown all the boxes in the recycling, new bookcases because there’s no more rooms to just stack shit against the walls.

Sometimes Wei says they should get a bed with drawers underneath, like he’d had back home, and when he clarifies his voice half-catches. Tatsuya supposes he’d know all about saving space, but doesn’t say, thumbs Wei’s bangs off his brow and kisses the crease on his forehead.

Their bed is still the short queen-size they’d squabbled about assembling when they were eighteen, and the stickers with letters corresponding to shitty drawings on the manual are still stuck against the headboard. Tatsuya hadn’t planned on taking them off, because they’ll need them when they reassemble the bed after they move.

He’d caught Wei absently peeling at one; his nails are too long. The stickers are stuck, so it doesn’t matter, and Tatsuya had said nothing. It’s not like they have a place to go. It’s not like Wei’s picked up that book on Chinese job requirements since putting it in the first bookshelf; it’s still on the corner on the bottom and the purple spine is dusty now. Tatsuya doesn’t suppose either of them would fare very well on that route now. And at least here they’re both out of place, still; even if Tatsuya picks up on some of the more references and Wei’s pronunciation is more fluid and sometimes they blend in. But even though Tatsuya’s tired of feeling like a foreigner here the last time he went home was over Christmas last year and everything had been wrong. He’d felt like a foreigner in LA, too, the first time since he could use his fingers to count his age, trying to get used to people saying things in English and Spanish and anything that wasn’t Japanese and the only times he’d been at home were waiting in line at Starbucks and the woman ahead of him on the phone yelling at someone she probably loved in Cantonese just how Wei does with his brothers.

He’d driven everywhere on the freeway and it’s always taken him a few days to get used to it, to the pace (or lack thereof) and the cacophony of engines and how when it gets dark out he can see the cascade of brake lights like falling dominos until he hits his own. This time, he hadn’t had time to look for it because he was drifting too far over to the right and he’d had to check all three mirrors and the night driving was making his entire body tense. This time he didn’t get used to it; this time he let his mom drive him to the airport and sat on the passenger side and watched the unfamiliar places in his own neighborhood, houses remodeled but already dirty or stores that weren’t there the last time he was (or maybe they had been but he didn’t have enough time here to notice) or glassy high-rises that look like somebody picked them up from downtown and plopped them there for no goddamn reason.

And landing in Narita had felt good, not just because coach involves collapsing himself like a box ready for recycling and the flight’s always too damn long, not just because Wei had been there too and they’d fallen asleep against each other on the train ride back. The barista at the coffee shop two blocks away from their apartment who knows his regular black iced coffee and blueberry muffin had laughed the same way she always had at the fake name Wei gives her to write on their cups.

“Let’s go, Kazuhiko,” Tatsuya had said, jerking his head toward the door.

“Shut up,” Wei had grumbled into his tea and then they’d opened the door and the cold air had slapped them in the face exactly how Tatsuya had been expecting it to.

He doesn’t need to square his shoulders to prepare anymore. Sometimes he still does, though.

Right now he doesn’t. He’s wearing Wei’s old thermal shirt under his jacket, the one that had been fraying and bleach-stained when Tatsuya had met him. The cuffs are halfway to torn-off, the seam torn through enough to get one thumb through the wrist part and wear the rest like gloves. Tatsuya squeezes the fabric to his palms; it’s not worth the extra effort to also brace himself against the wind when there’s three blocks from the bus stop to the apartment. When they were in high school, coming back to the dorms in August when they got out of practice before nightfall, they’d race the dark back and keep moving the goalposts (if they can see the stars, not just planets and shit, by the time they’re at the door, or if the light stuff is just at the edge by the time they look out the window over Wei’s bed, if according to some weather website it’s past the scheduled sunset time) but now even when they come back together they don’t do that. They live by the bus schedules; thirty seconds of variability isn’t enough. And they’re also not trying to flirt without really flirting, offer a suggestion while making sure not to commit to either route, sit on the fence.

There’s a lot about that Tatsuya misses, but there’s a lot he totally doesn’t. His fingertips, protruding from the shirt’s cuffs, are freezing and half-numb, and either or both makes touching the metal of his keys easier.

“Welcome back,” Wei says, before Tatsuya can say anything. There’s only meter and a half between the apartment door and the bed that’s pressed up against the far wall of the bedroom, and Wei always leaves the door open when he comes home first. The window’s open, and if there’s anything in the mug sitting amidst the chaos on Wei’s bedside table (mostly beer caps and envelopes from bills they’d paid in the summer) it’s probably cold.

“I’m back,” Tatsuya says, and then pads deeper into the living room and away from the door to shrug his coat onto the couch.

The leftovers in the fridge look wholly unappetizing, but it’s already night and barely half-past four in the afternoon and they can’t afford to be ordering food and tipping the delivery person all the time and they have to draw the line somewhere because tonight wouldn’t be a one-time thing. He grabs the two bottles of Asahi from the door and waits for the sound of Wei dramatically flopping onto the couch behind him.

Tatsuya takes the first sip too quickly; Asahi’s not really his thing. He says it, repeats it; Wei cuts him off and finishes the sentence when he comes home with another six pack from the liquor store because it’s always on special. It tastes the way he expects, though; it’s that almost-familiar the way coffee was when he was thirteen and trying to imitate his favorite beatniks. The head’s coming up through the neck; he waits and sucks it off and catches Wei’s eye; Wei makes a disgruntled sort of noise that’s all theatrics with him (it took him a while to finally realize that yes, Tatsuya does 99 percent of those things on purpose, but he’s there now).

The beer feels heavy in his hands; Tatsuya puts it on the coffee table where he knows it’ll leave another ring, a Venn diagram against the one beside it. He glances out at the dark, the windows across the alley. Wei follows his gaze.

“I know,” he says.

Sometimes Tatsuya likes when he says things without words, but sometimes he wants the words even when he doesn’t need them, when Wei’s thigh is already pressed against his and Wei’s arm is around his shoulders. Wei reaches over (doesn’t even have to shift his position around Tatsuya) to put his own beer on the table. He doesn’t repeat himself.

**Author's Note:**

> as always lmk if mistakes


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